Watch what the Japan tsunami did to the ice shelf on the coast of Antarctica. (via @nytimesgreen)

Japan’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake in March was so powerful that it shifted the island of Honshu eight feet to the east and caused the deaths of at least 15,600 people. The resulting tsunami also produced a wave that radiated throughout the rest of the world’s oceans. And according to research published online on Wednesday in the Journal of Glaciology , it caused massive chunks of ice with a combined surface area about twice that of Manhattan to break off from an ice shelf on the coast of Antarctica. The video above traces the process. While it has long been suspected that seismic activity of this magnitude could affect ice shelves — Charles Darwin thought as much about icebergs he observed in a fjord in Chile after an earthquake — this is the first time that scientists have been able to use satellite imagery to document the phenomenon as it occurred. Eighteen hours after th...